I once worked at a hybrid IT/consulting shop. A lot of companies still run Windows Server, but the space is being rapidly cannibalized by cloud services. In the

I once worked at a hybrid IT/consulting shop. A lot of companies still run Windows Server, but the space is being rapidly cannibalized by cloud services. In the few years I worked there we had already lost maybe 20% of our IT contracts to customers moving to cloud services like Office365 and Google for work. Custom software as a business is still thriving but basically everything new is running on cloud (and not Windows) at the clients request. Which means no Windows Server and related service contract revenue. Quite a large percentage of our IT contracts were conversion contracts to move companies to cloud services, and I assume it's only gotten worse in the years since then. Windows Server has decent market share because of inertia but I would bet money that it's in an irreversible decline. MS has been taking the unusual step of making their server software like SQL Server and .NET Core run on native Linux, so it seems they've seen the end coming as well. I agree with you that SQL Server is a good product. Far better than other 'legacy' databases like Oracle and DB2. The problem is that the paid contract model is dying. There's tons of mature and free SQL databases, and for the average project you only need so many features. SQL is such a mature tech that most projects could use any SQL database. The differentiation is gone, so there's no longer a reason to pay.